US fighter jet crashes in Death Valley, 7 park visitors hurt
LOS ANGELES — A U.S. Navy fighter jet crashed Wednesday in Death Valley National Park, injuring seven people who were at a scenic overlook where aviation enthusiasts routinely watch military pilots speeding low through a chasm dubbed Star Wars Canyon, officials said.
The crash sent dark smoke billowing in the air, said Aaron Cassell, who was working at his family’s Panamint Springs Resort about 10 miles (16 kilometers) away and was the first to report the crash to park dispatch.
“I just saw a black mushroom cloud go up,” Cassell told The Associated Press. “Typically you don’t see a mushroom cloud in the desert.”
A search was underway for the pilot of the single-seat F/A-18 Super Hornet that was on a routine training mission, said Lt. Cmdr. Lydia Bock, spokeswoman for Naval Air Station Lemoore in California’s Central Valley.
“The status of the pilot is unknown at this time,” Bock said about four hours after the crash.
Moscow couple shaken but defiant after police crackdown
MOSCOW — The young woman screamed as her boyfriend lay atop her, absorbing the blows of a helmeted riot policeman.
It’s one of the indelible images of the violent police response to an unauthorized protest in Moscow.
Inga Kudracheva’s terror and anguish are clear in the video and photos that spread across Russian social media and foreign news coverage of the July 27 crackdown in which an arrest-monitoring group said nearly 1,400 people were detained.
Yet Kudracheva and Boris Kantorovich say the ordeal has only strengthened them.
“People are not afraid of police anymore. Even though police were beating us violently and tried to intimidate us, it was worth it,” the 27-year-old told The Associated Press on Tuesday, sitting on a sofa with Kudracheva and occasionally squeezing her hand reassuringly.
Organizers finally cancel troubled Woodstock 50 festival
NEW YORK — Woodstock 50 is officially canceled.
Organizers announced Wednesday that the troubled festival that hit a series of setbacks in the last four months won’t take place next month.
The three-day festival was originally scheduled for Aug. 16-18, but holdups included permit denials and the loss of a financial partner and a production company.
Last week Jay-Z, Dead & Company and John Fogerty announced that they wouldn’t perform at the event after organizers said it was moving to Maryland from New York.
“We are saddened that a series of unforeseen setbacks has made it impossible to put on the festival we imagined with the great lineup we had booked and the social engagement we were anticipating,” festival co-founder Michael Lang said in a statement Wednesday. “We released all the talent so any involvement on their part would be voluntary. Due to conflicting radius issues in the DC area many acts were unable to participate and others passed for their own reasons.”
Advocates: ‘Horrible deja vu’ in continued family separation
NEW YORK — In the first couple of months after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration last year to stop separating most parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of children sent to New York fell.
Then, advocates say, the children started coming again in a steady stream, many too young to understand their circumstances or how to find their parents.
“It’s just been this horrible sense of deja vu,” said Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program for the Archdiocese of New York’s Catholic Charities Community Services. The organization is among the advocacy agencies around the country that have joined in a filing from the American Civil Liberties Union that says more than 900 children were taken from parents in the year after the judge issued the injunction.
It’s “the same problem that we had over a year ago prior to the injunction that we hoped against hope would be stayed by the court,” he said. “But the government seems to not care about the court’s order, frankly.”
The 911 children were separated from 844 parents between the court order issued on June 26, 2018, and June 29 of this year, according to the ACLU’s analysis of government records it received under the judge’s supervision. The Justice Department declined to comment.
